One invention helped save millions of lives, the other helped fine tune navigation systems now taken for granted by the military and civilians alike. The masterminds behind the kidney dialysis machine and the Global Positioning System on Tuesday each received $500 000 awards that are the engineering profession’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize.
Ivan Getting and Bradford Parkinson, both from California, received the Charles Stark Draper Prize for creating GPS, the ubiquitous system used by everyone from lost automobile drivers to soldiers fine-tuning the path of aircraft and missiles. Getting is considered the visionary behind GPS, and Parkinson the architect
who helped implement the system.
Dr Willem Kolff, who developed the kidney dialysis under the rigours of the Nazi occupation of Holland during World War II, was awarded the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize. Kolff used sausage casings and an old water pump to form his first dialysis machine.
His family immigrated to Ohio in 1950 but he now lives outside Philadelphia. The two awards were presented by the National Academy of Engineering, which considers individual achievement as well as an innovation’s impact on society when awarding its prizes.
”We like to try to pick things that affect people’s lives,” said NAE president William A. Wulf. ”Partly, we’re celebrating the individuals and partly we’re celebrating the whole collection of things that engineers have brought to the public.”
Parkinson, chairman of Aerospace Corp., said he has been surprised by the widespread use of GPS — even among fisherman and farmers — in the several decades since its 1973 creation.
Wulf pointed out that Nasa investigators relied on GPS coordinates provided by fisherman to find pieces of debris from the Columbia shuttle after it broke apart on February 1.
Parkinson said GPS is actually the product of many technologies pulled together by teams of engineers.
”This is a metaphor for so many things that we as a society take for granted — telephones, automobiles, airplanes, the World Wide Web,” he said. ”All of those things were done by teams of engineers who were largely anonymous.”
Parkinson will share his $500 000 prize with the 91-year-old Getting, the founding president of The Aerospace Corporation.
At a news conference on Tuesday announcing his award, Kolff brought his latest invention — a portable artificial lung. His other creations include the artificial eye and a balloon pump to be inserted in the aorta that improves blood flow and reduces the heart’s workload during certain procedures. He also has worked on
an artificial ear implanted in 63 people at the University of Utah. – Sapa-AP